There is an excellent article on O’Reilly Radar about the use of Web applications in a military environment. Basically, DARPA came up with a combination of a Wiki and Google Maps that would allow soldiers to see where IEDs were being utilized by the enemy, sharing intelligence in real time and allowing patterns to be found and actions to be implemented by the people on the ground.

This really is an outstanding example of the power of information architecture. Traditional intelligence focused on getting information up the chain of command, getting it analyzed, and getting a comprehensive plan back to the troops. However, this situation was too fluid, too fast, too rapidly changing to go through all that rigamarole. So, the oversight and aggregation process was automated.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

First, it seems to highlight a general rule of technology: Once a process can’t move faster or be more flexible than automation, it will be subsumed. We have seen this a million times in a million different ways. Most of us have been a part of this process, either as an automator or being automated.

Second, it highlights how important it is for management and administration to improve as rapidly as the organizations they support. In the past, it has been the job of management to drive their subordinate organizations to improve, and often they did not hold themselves to the same standards. I can recall a time where the person who demanded that we automate everything possible required us to manually fill out and send an Excel spreadsheets that documented our progress.

I think that we are in the throws of new wave of organizational change based on newer, more flexible technologies like Wikis, Open Mapping Tools, and Social Networking. We should be seeing a lot more of stories like this in the MSM over the next year or so as it moves into the more public consciousness. And, in 24 months it will be a part of the common wisdom, and we won’t remember doing thing any differently.

In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly familiar with these ideas must be on a contract, working out of a cave, typing programs on dusty green screen terminal connected to the corporate mainframe by a thick token ring cable.

However, the ‘new trend’ of allowing users actually provide feedback into the products that they are using has produced a professorship at MIT and been mentioned in the New York Times ::sigh::  IMHO, this is simply the realization that ignoring people is less effective than communicating with them, and less effective means less profitable.  I think the technology world should be embarassed that it is so disfunctional that this is at all new or interesting enough to study.

On a similar note, Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts about how to have a business conversation.  If you plan on doing anything other than pure solo work for the rest of your life it is mandatory reading.  Interestingly, it seems that the best conversationalists are the ones who are the most considerate and do the most listening.  Sounds like organizations might want to focus on having an actual conversation with their customers …

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response?

[Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a feeder program to prepare college students to work for them, so they recently established software institutes in the Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, both in the coastal city of Weihai. That’s where Symbio is about to establish a new development center. Says Hsu, who grew up in San Francisco: “Other companies have university partnerships; we run the university departments.”

This isn’t something Symbio undertakes lightly. “We’re a human potential factory. We’re in the talent management business,” says Hsu. “In the next couple of years the companies that win will be the ones who manage talent the best.”

The Chinese have an abundance mentality, a positive outlook for their long-term future. Not only are they doing business successfully today, they are investing in building a generation of leaders for tomorrow. At the same time, western companies are shedding jobs and looking to outsource jobs and import labor to meet the needs of the moment. The west isn’t going to lose its edge because of quarterly profit outlooks, it is going to lose it because it lacks the vision to see the future and the audacity to put itself at the center of it!

Well, I think we can now say that social networking is a bona fide part of our culture.  CNN is reporting that students are pledging to give up social networking for Lent. I have been working my profile on LinkedIn (and really enjoy their answers feature) so I can see where they are coming from.

Organizations that fight against this trend are going to be at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to hiring the best and brightest of the next generation.  You have been warned!

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”

– John Gaule